Skip to main contentThe Binewski circus is in trouble. So Al and Crystal Lil decide to resuscitate it with freaks—their own children, deliberately mutated by insecticide and drugs. Strap in for a shocking, hilarious, disturbing thrill ride of a novel, narrated by an albino dwarf, featuring a pair of conjoined twins, an aquatic “flipper boy,” and a millennial cult of amputation.
Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn, published in 1989 and a finalist for the National Book Award that year, is a story like no other. Most critics raved (though some recoiled in horror). “Probably one of the most extraordinary novels of this decade,” The Seattle Times wrote. The book sold more than 400,000 copies, was translated into 13 languages, including Finnish and Hebrew, and has never been out of print.
The novel captured the ramshackle, almost deranged spirit of Portland in the Vietnam era. Perhaps that’s because Dunn was immersed in that world. Born in 1945, she spent a rootless, hardscrabble childhood moving from one small town to the next before her family settled in Tigard, where her stepfather managed a gas station. Dunn left home at 17. She won a full scholarship to Reed College but dropped out in 1967 to hit the road with the flower children. An intellectual vagabond, she hopscotched around the globe and landed back in Portland, where she waited tables at the Stepping Stone Cafe, poured shots at a dive bar named the Earth, painted houses, danced topless, hosted a radio show, and wrote a legendary column for WW called The Slice, answering reader questions on topics such as why men have nipples.
Geek Love punched a savage, jagged hole in the prim complacency of suburban America. Somehow the phantasmagorical story felt true, even when you knew it wasn’t real. The book inspired legions of fans, from grunge pioneers Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love to Monty Python filmmaker Terry Gilliam to bassist Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It also gave Dunn a source of income, which enabled her to focus on writing—she was one of the country’s preeminent boxing writers—and mentor a lengthy list of local scribes.
Perhaps more importantly, the success of Geek Love gave generations of young authors—people like Chuck Palahniuk, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Rene Denfeld, to name just a few in Portland—an example of how to push beyond the mainstream.
Read it and weep: Dunn died of lung cancer in 2016, but her spirit is very much alive. The best way to catch her drift? Read Geek Love. Then you can call yourself a true Portlander.
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